In a hospital or a nursing care facility, for example, a patient, a care-receiver, or the like (hereinafter, abbreviated as the care-receiver) is required to move to other places from a state where the care-receiver lies on a bed in a hospital room many times a day. At this time, transferring of the care-receiver from the bed to a wheelchair is usually manually performed by a nurse, a caregiver, or the like (hereinafter, abbreviated as the caregiver). By such transferring, the caregiver bears a physical burden.
In order to reduce the physical burden on the caregiver by the transferring of the care-receiver, a bed in which a part of the bed is separated therefrom so as to be utilized as a wheelchair is proposed.
FIG. 12 shows a conventional bed 1. A bed surface of the bed 1 is composed of three plates of a side bed plate 2, a center bed plate 3, and a side bed plate 4. In order to compose the bed surface, there is a need for moving the center bed plate 3 of a platform truck 5 to a space 3a between the side bed plate 2 and the side bed plate 4. A caregiver brings up the side bed plate 4 to an upper side of a bed main body 6 taking a rotation mechanism 7 as a rotation center.
The caregiver moves the center bed plate 3 to the space 3a in a state where the side bed plate 4 is brought up to the upper side of the bed main body 6. By returning the side bed plate 4 to an original position after moving the platform truck 5 to the space 3a, the bed surface of the bed 1 is composed.
The platform truck 5 separated from the bed 1 can also be used as a wheelchair. In that case, the center bed plate 3 serves as a seating bottom of the wheelchair.
FIG. 13 is a side view of the platform truck 5. The platform truck 5 has a chair posture change mechanism in which a leg portion 3c is inclined in conjunction with an inclination of a back surface portion 3b in order to simply change the center bed plate 3 from a flat posture to a seating posture. When the back surface portion 3b is lifted upward until the back surface portion 3b becomes substantially vertical, the leg portion 3c is lowered downward via a first link 8a and a second link 8b. That is, only by lifting the back surface portion 3b, the leg portion 3c is lowered downward, and the flat posture is changed to the seating posture. Therefore, the caregiver can simply perform posture change of the wheelchair (for example, refer to Patent Literature 1).